Microsoft finally released Non-Profit pricing for Office 365, and it's free for the base plan!!!

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As soon as I found out about the free base plan I started in on setting up a hybrid configuration with my on-premises Exchange 2010 servers. There were a few bumps and things to learn about, a good little intro to PowerShell, but overall it was incredibly smooth! I initially set up ADFS, but later on found that it was overkill and too complex for what we needed - and with ADFS logging into Office365 required that my infrastructure be up, with just DirSync my network can die and we can still use Office365. Ended up slowly migrating users, and for the most part they didn't notice a difference other than they had to put their password into Outlook. I am still really amazed at how easy to use Office365 is, and yet I still maintain 95% of the power over the system that I had with on-premises Exchange, including managing retention policies, what can connect to the server, etc. I was finally able to remove all the monitors I had set up, and waking up the morning after the final migration and not immediately checking my phone to make sure Exchange was up with no problems made me smile.

Office 365 has been absolutely great for our organization. We have a handful of E3 subscribers, but about 260 E1 subscribers. We have really started taking advantage of Lync in the past month, and still working on migrating our SharePoint stuff over (I can't wait to decommission that server!). Since we have completed our migration Microsoft has cleaned up the interface and put more options in as well - so it's nice to know that it is also a work in progress. They also have a nice admin dashboard that tells of outages and what they are doing to fix them, so if someone complains I can check that real fast and make sure it is all up.

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Exchange really came into power with 2010. The ability to create Database Availability Groups gave SMB a much more reliable email infrastructure, though it was a pain to set up and maintain at times. PowerShell gave some more scripting options that 2003 didn't have before. Moving off of Exchange to Office 365 was almost too easy!

PowerShell definitely takes some getting used to, a lot of syntax differences from other scripting languages, but it's powerful - if you can think it or do it with a GUI you can likely do it with PowerShell.